Cofco’s Joy City steps up mall expansion plan in China with Singapore’s GIC and China Life
The company plans to operate 100 malls within 10 years from about 10 now
Joy City, the Hong Kong-listed commercial property arm of state-owned conglomerate Cofco, plans to leverage its funds to reach its new goal of operating 100 malls within 10 years, a highly ambitious target considering that it planned to own only 20 malls by 2020.
The ambitious vision marked a departure from its previous cautious approach when it stated that its goal was to operate 20 malls by 2020. The developer has opened only nine malls in the past 10 years in China with another 10 in the pipeline.
“In the past we concentrated on building our brand and operation expertise,” said Zhou. “Now we feel that we have come to a stage where we can leverage our know-how to expand faster.”
Xu Hanping, chief financial officer of Joy City, said that even with a 60 per cent leverage, the fund pool can be expanded to more than 20 billion yuan and be used to buy out distressed malls.
“It’s much quicker than acquiring land and building a new mall from scratch.
“GIC has cooperated with us before on individual projects and is very content with us, and we decided to upgrade the cooperation to fund level,” she said.